Like many grouse, ruffed grouse are prone to population cycles—peaks and crashes in ten- to twelve-year intervals. There can be five times as many grouse in a single location in one decade than in the next. Alaskan and Canadian cycles have been linked, oddly enough, to population cycles of snowshoe hares. When hares are scarce, predators turn to grouse, causing crashes in their populations. Great Lakes grouse populations seem to decline when northern goshawks and great horned owls invade from farther north.
Many people in southern Ohio believe that turkeys eat the grouse’s food out from under it. I can see how a bird that’s four times a grouse’s size but eats many of the same things and travels in large flocks could provide stiff competition. I suspect that that’s what’s going on here. I can hope that the turkeys, which seem to have population cycles of their own, might leave some room for grouse to rebound. It seems that between the active selective cutting our neighbors practice and the maturing, uncut forest we maintain, there should be ample habitat—young, old, and recovering—to provide for grouse.
There is so much here—there are whip-poor-wills and a dozen species of warblers, box turtles and seventy kinds of butterflies, but I still miss the grouse. Aldo Leopold said it best: “Everyone knows . . . that the autumn landscape in the north woods is the land, plus a red maple, plus a Ruffed Grouse. In terms of conventional physics, the grouse represents only a millionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre yet subtract the grouse and the whole thing is dead.”
So I wait out the down cycle, if cycle it be, and remember the grouse in my past. There was the nest of eggs I stumbled upon in the Connecticut woods, when I lived in a tiny cottage and drew and painted by night. The hen was tending pipping eggs, and she crawled off the nest, flopping on her side and whining like a hurt animal, momentarily tempting me to follow. She left a drift of feathers and her precious eggs in the rain. I retreated as quickly as I could, knowing I’d intruded at the most delicate of moments. Late the next afternoon I crept back, fixing my binoculars on the spot, to see if all had gone well. There in the scrape on the ground at the base of a hemlock was a single egg. There was no sign of disturbance. All the chicks had hatched and gone; tiny bits of pipped eggshell showed that the hen had carried the shells off as the chicks hatched. And when the chicks were able to walk, within a few hours, she had led them away, leaving this one behind.
I picked up the cold, roundish, buff white egg and cradled it in my hand. I held it against a spot of sun in the hemlocks. It looked to have a chick inside. I hurried home, holding it against my stomach, and set up a heating pad, a thermometer, and a damp washcloth in a makeshift incubator. I didn’t know if it would hatch; I didn’t know what I’d do with the chick if it did. Maybe I’d walk with it until I found its family, put a tiny blindfold on it so it wouldn’t imprint on me instead of its mother. I hadn’t thought that far. But such is the magic of an unhatched egg, the potential and mystery of it, that I had to try.
The egg never peeped, never pipped. So, carefully, I made a nick in the shell and removed it piece by piece, an archaeologist uncovering the most precious of relics. Wet yellowish down, a curled pink foot. There was a full-term chick inside. I warmed it, dried it, couldn’t believe it could be dead. It was so beautiful and new. Most amazing of all were its wings—not the downy stubs I’d expected but feathered with buff brown plumage, finely vermiculated with black scrawls. Seven of its ten primaries had burst the sheath; about half of the secondaries had emerged. I had never realized that a ruffed grouse chick hatches with feathered wings. How could that be? It was clear that the waxy sheaths had started growing while the chick was still in the egg. That an embryo could grow feathers within an egg, in only twenty-five days of incubation, still defies my understanding.
These minuscule feathers will hardly be able to support the bird’s flight as it grows, so a ruffed grouse chick begins molting within a few hours of hatching. By the end of its first week of life, the chick’s second set of flight feathers begins to emerge, starting from the innermost and working toward the outermost. At this age, the chick can fly, and it is disarming to have a downy fluff ball suddenly levitate, furiously beating tiny wings, and disappear into the upper branches of a tree.
The impression is more bumblebee than bird, but the net effect is escape. By Day 10, ruffed grouse chicks fly very well. They’ll stay with their brood, following their mother, for twelve to fifteen weeks, dispersing in November, “the moon when the grouse go crazy” according to Canadian naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton. It’s then that people may be surprised to find a grouse crashing full-tilt through a living room window. Dispersing juveniles careen off in all directions, doing very strange things.
Speaking of strange, there is another aspect of ruffed grouse behavior that remains unexplained. I’ve experienced it three times in my life, and I have read and heard many anecdotal accounts that follow the form of my own.
When I lived in Hadlyme, Connecticut, we hauled our garbage to the town dump, New England style. The landfill was ringed by thick forest, attended by crows, turkey vultures, and one very assertive ruffed grouse. We learned to drive slowly down the dump lane, for when he heard a car, this wild male grouse would hurry out of the forest, shining black ruffs flared around his face, to meet it. He’d pace back and forth by the door, occasionally alighting on the hood, and rush us when we got out of the car. There was a gruff man we called the Dumpmeister, who kept us all honest about what we brought to the landfill. He had a soft spot for Dump Grouse. He named him, talked to him, but in the end he couldn’t protect the bizarre and beautiful bird from running under the heedless wheels of a truck.
After we moved to our Appalachian Ohio home in 1992, a male ruffed grouse would burst out of the woods to meet Bill’s car as he traveled the driveway. The bird would strut and display in the road, barely moving aside to let Bill pass.
People who witness such behavior in a ruffed grouse often assume that the bird was raised as a pet, but not many people have the ability to raise a grouse, and the behavior arises spontaneously and often in remote locales. Something else is going on, something odd inside the tiny grouse brain that causes it to substitute vehicles, machines, and people for more appropriate conspecific rivals or mates. Some have speculated that the rumble of automobile engines triggers a primitive response in the birds, which find in this sound some echo of their territorial wing drumming. How, then, to explain House Grouse?
She lived on a Nature Conservancy preserve in Connecticut, and so did I. Several thousand acres of unbroken forest surrounded my little cabin in the clearing. I was alone there much of the time and had no reason to speak much. When the telephone would ring and I’d answer it, a young female ruffed grouse would hurry out of the woods and pace beneath the window, peering up at me. If the conversation went on for a long time, as they often did, she’d fly up to a cedar branch closest to the window and settle in with her eyes half-closed and neck pulled in, as if soothed by the sound of my voice. If I walked with a friend, talking, she’d follow. Of course, I felt hopelessly flattered by her attention, even as I wondered why she gave it. There seems to be nothing adaptive in cozying up to a large omnivorous primate.
My landlords had a black Labrador at the time, and her mind-numbing behavioral repertoire included eating, begging, stealing, romping, and killing. I knew that only luck had kept House Grouse out of her teeth. I found a strew of the grouse’s tail feathers, matted with dog slobber, in the lane she frequented, and knew that my endearing little companion wouldn’t escape twice. Three days later, my little friend sought me out, ragged and half-tailed. How could I teach vigilance to a bird born innocent and seemingly without the sense to stay away?
Two more days, and here came Derry, roaring up the lane, huge-headed with her prize. I grabbed the dog’s scruff, twisted, cut off her air, and extracted my dear friend from the Lab’s hard mouth; Derry wasn’t even a decent retriever. Grouse’s left leg and right wing were broken; her ribs were crushed. I cleaned her wou
nds, applied antibiotic salve, fed her, and bedded her down on sweet hay. I measured her and sketched out splints for her leg and wing, hoping she’d live until the next morning. She whimpered as I wept over her. I left her in the cool barn for the night and read for three hours, unable to sleep, gripped in despair for my strange companion, for the cruelty of a world that keeps no place for a trusting game bird. I raised my head from the blurring lines, brought up like a fish to the surface, and knew Grouse had died. Her eyes were still closing when I reached her.
I carried her out to a rock in the meadow, an offering to the coyotes, an apology to the broken body of a strange bird. For a brief while, she’d brightened my life. I knew when we met that she wouldn’t be here long; she was of another world, a better one; a peaceable kingdom where grouse bustle out of the forest to stroll with people.
White-throated Sparrow
The Song in My Heart
MOST PEOPLE KNOW white-throated sparrows as fall and winter migrants, kicking happily in the leaf litter beneath sheltering brambles, flocking to seed that’s been cast on the ground. Their bright, sharp queep! queep! call, given as the birds go to a communal roost in the evening, was one of the first birdcalls I remember tracking down on a late-winter evening near my home in Richmond, Virginia. In the 1960s and ’70s, there were still remnant patches of the old, horsy Virginia in the West End suburbs, and this little farm was one of them. I could walk up Academy Road and stroke velvet noses, inhale the good, sharp scent of horse sweat, even muck out stalls in return for the occasional harrowing bareback ride on a fat, ill-behaved paint mare named Apache.
There were horses and there were birds, and I spent many of my afternoons hanging around the place taking it all in. White-throated sparrows kicked and scratched all winter in the pine straw and oak leaves, picking up waste feed. Their quavering song, often represented as Poor Sam Peabody, occasionally arose from one of the flock, but that lusty roost call—queep! queep!—mystified me until the evening I decided to find out from whence it came. I could barely make out the crown stripes of the calling sparrows, but I still remember the thrill that shot through me when I was able to connect the odd call with a familiar bird. The horse farm is gone now, long since rolled under the parking lot of an enormous Baptist church, complete with its own broadcasting tower, which, on Sundays, replaced every one of our radio stations with the blustery tones of its preacher. With the woodland and pasture went the winter flocks of white-throated sparrows.
In the early 1980s, I spent six weeks in Newfoundland, and I hiked its cool, rocky paths on what passed for summer days—in the fifties, with a fine rain falling. The heady scent of balsam rose around me whenever the sun dared peer out. The wistful songs of white-throated sparrows—stronger now, not wavering, since the birds were on their breeding grounds—seemed the perfect aural embodiment of the aroma of fir: sweet, elusive, nostalgic, and intoxicating. Bright-eyed, they watched me as they carried spruce budworms and caterpillars to their young. I never hear a white-throat’s song without returning, just for a moment, to the short, dark forests of the Rock.
Learning about birds is, for me, like piecing together a puzzle that lasts a lifetime. I chase down their songs, one by one, spurning audio recordings in favor of hearing that song coming from an open bill. I pick up and store random fragments of information: bits of songs and calls, foraging and breeding behavior, flight style, bathing behavior. I piece them together in memory until I begin to see the bird take form. I may never be granted an entire image, but occasionally I have an interaction with an individual that grants an unusual and unexpected insight, a glimpse into the imponderable. So it was with one white-throated sparrow.
A call came in on the evening of April 23, 1991, from a woman in Groton, Connecticut. She’d picked up an adult white-throated sparrow in her backyard, seemingly uninjured but for its head, which was completely inverted. How odd. I wanted to see if I could help, so I met her to pick it up. The bird trembled and blinked, looking at the world upside down, its head twisted dramatically to the right, throat up, crown down. I asked the woman if it might have come into contact with any poisons. They had just fertilized their lawn. Perhaps the bird had picked up and been poisoned by some granular fertilizer, I mused, as I drove my new patient home.
On the advice of my veterinarian, I took the sparrow to a local practitioner who injected the forty-gram bird with atropine, an antidote for carbamines and organophosphates. Since the bird had been in this condition for at least twenty-four hours, we decided not to give activated carbon, which might have helped neutralize a more recently ingested poison.
Because it couldn’t orient its head to pick up its own food, I force-fed the helpless sparrow with ground canary chow, fortified with nutritional supplements. It eagerly accepted live mealworms and bits of sunflower seed from my fingers. Its bright eyes and hearty appetite were at odds with the poisoning diagnosis, but its head remained inverted, and it was incapable of flying, hopping, perching, or feeding on its own. After two days of this, with no improvement, I decided to administer an antibiotic in hopes that the affliction might have a bacterial component. The bird was doomed anyway and would have died long ago had I not been feeding it. An antibiotic couldn’t hurt, I reasoned. Its appetite remained hearty, and it calmly submitted to force feedings, accepting more and more tidbits directly from my fingers.
On April 27, I felt a clump of feathers on the sparrow’s neck and parted the feathers to reveal a dime-size hole in the skin at the base of its skull. Oh! The matted feathers had concealed an injury, probably inflicted by a housecat, to the bird’s neck muscles. I was floored, happy to have an explanation for the bird’s bizarre head position and glad I’d decided to administer an antibiotic, since cat saliva teems with bacteria that can be lethal to birds. The injury was old enough that my veterinarian advised to let it heal naturally. I cleaned it up and began a new thrust in the bird’s rehabilitation and a new, if temporary, job description: avian physical therapist.
After every feeding, I massaged the twisted muscles of the sparrow’s thin neck as I held it by the bill. With each session, I gently twisted the head closer to upright. Improvement was dramatic. The next day, the sparrow wriggled out of my grasp and flew through the kitchen into my living room, landing on the carpet. Its still-inverted head was a few degrees closer to vertical, and it blinked at me with a quizzical look as I laughed and scooped it up to return it to its glass tank home. I supplied it with a perch and was delighted to see it hop up and cling briefly, its head still twisted ninety degrees to the right, but no longer upside down. I gave it a dish of sunflower hearts, which it eyed but didn’t attempt to eat.
Throughout the bird’s therapy, I was struck by its calm demeanor and its willingness to eat what I offered it. It couldn’t have been enjoying itself, but it was a willing and compliant patient, with a sunny attitude that matched the name the woman’s preschool daughters had given it: Sunshine, for the brilliant yellow loral spot that shone against its bright white crown stripes. Children often name an injured or orphaned bird the moment they pick it up; wildlife rehabilitators refrain from such indulgences until it’s clear that their charges will survive. Sunshine he would be.
By May 2, Sunshine was picking at the sunflower hearts in his dish, his strengthening neck allowing him enough coordination to hold it upright long enough to take a morsel before the muscles snapped sideways again. He trembled with the effort, but he was feeding himself, and his activity level increased. I gave him a larger cage and more perches, and moved him to a side room where he’d be less likely to panic at unfamiliar stimuli.
By May 3, I had discontinued the antibiotic. Sunshine struggled free from my grasp and flew like a wild thing through the house, neatly avoiding the windows, negotiating the doorways. It was a good, if unexpected, test of his powers of flight. Another week ground by, and he picked up more food on his own with each passing day. It was a relief to know he could feed himself, and it gave me a little freedom. His head was still noti
ceably tilted to the right, so I kept up the frequent physical therapy that had gotten him this far along the path to recovery.
At dawn on May 9, I awoke to the quavering song of a white-throated sparrow—inside my little house. Sunshine was singing. I’d guessed his sex correctly, though the plumage of white-throated sparrows gives no hint of their sex. Some adults have bright white crown stripes and yellow loral spots; some have dull buff crowns and no loral spots, but the coloring is unrelated to sex; both adult males and females come in white- and buff-crowned morphs.
Sunshine had been feeding himself since the fourth of May and had laid on a good pad of fat in the V of his breastbone. He felt well enough to sing! During physical therapy that afternoon, he bit me. His head was now tilted just a few degrees to the right, giving him a rakish, inquisitive look. Oh yes, he was going to make it. By May 11, I knew I’d done as much as I could for this sparrow, and he’d reached that delicate edge of wildness and vigor that can have only one outcome: release. I opened my hands in the balmy spring air, and Sunshine rocketed to a large mountain laurel shrub, where he dove into the tangled darkness like any good white-throated sparrow would. I scattered mixed seed all over the yard, left saucers of water on the ground, and said a prayer that he’d reach his Canadian breeding grounds before it was too late to find a mate and stake out a territory. Thinking about it, I scaled back my wish, hoping simply that he’d be able to survive, feed himself, and fly well enough to make it south come winter.
I didn’t see Sunshine again until the next afternoon, when I saw him scratching at the mixed seed under the laurel. On the morning of May 14, I awoke to the song of a white-throated sparrow, and I knew it was Sunshine, because all the other white-throats had long since departed for Canada. I pulled on my clothes and walked out into the yard to listen to this small bird’s hymn to the silence. Had the cat had its way, his song would have been forever stilled. I was changed, transformed by these three weeks of feeding, massaging, and hoping for a sparrow. Such work is its own reward. I knelt to pull some weeds from the neglected garden on the east side of the house, the May sun warming my back. Sunshine flew closer, to a maple just overhead, and sang. I smiled up at him, finished weeding, and moved to the iris bed in the front yard, happy to be in the company of a wild white-throated sparrow. He followed, perching in the top of a white pine just over a stone wall from where I was weeding. And he sang.
The Bluebird Effect Page 16